Chances are you’ve got a bunch of files that are really important to you. They’re so important that at some point someone told you that you really need to have a backup of all those files should anything happen to them, and you probably woke up in the middle of the night in a cold […]

This summer in Cadiz, Spain, I had the opportunity to teach photography to a group of 21 William & Mary student researchers, and, while it was challenging for everyone, I think we all learned a lot from the experience. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of our adventures. Francie Cate-Arries, W&M professor of […]

One of the aggravations of traveling abroad for research or study abroad is dealing with getting a cell phone working outside the US. Most of our faculty members and students just end up buying a cheap cellphone to use while traveling, but if you’re like me and you have an iPhone or other smartphone in the US, you’ve grown really dependent on your smartphone, and ditching it for a junky standard cellphone while abroad (just when you need your smartphone the most) is a real disappointment. My advice: bring it with you!

One of the challenges for faculty members and students on study abroad research and service learning trips is capturing their research in meaningful, engaging ways that can be captured and showcased for others at the College, and beyond, to benefit from. One current W&M solution to this problem is to create a course website using WordPress and then having students post their research on the website. While publishing research papers is a good first step, these text-based essays don’t take advantage of the great opportunity that a study abroad research trip affords for great photographic supplemental materials. Indeed, a good photo journal to go along with a student’s research can not only keep the reader of the website engaged, but it can help tell the story in fundamental ways that mere text alone can’t do.

Academic Information Services, in coordination with the Reves Center for International Studies and the International Advisory Committee (IAC) invites faculty members to submit applications for our “William & Mary Mapping our World” Internationalization Grant. The purpose of the award is to foster student research abroad and to provide an online showcase for that research. Special emphasis will be placed on research projects with a multimedia component.

So Pablo and I are working on an exciting new project — devoted to student research abroad–which is heavily dependent on being able to include an embedded interactive multimedia Web map. (You can look at the project here: W&M Global Mapping, but it isn’t ready for prime time as of this writing, so depending on when you visit the site, you may get crazy results. We’re hoping to have the site fully armed and operational by summer 2013.)

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance first introduced me to the competing concepts of the “classical” aesthetic and the “romantic” aesthetic. In short, and with apologies to Dr. Pirsig, the classical aesthetic is the ability to see beauty and meaning in systems and the interconnectivity of systems, while the romantic aesthetic is the ability to see beauty and meaning in individual objects. While these two aesthetics are not necessarily at odds with each other, I find that in my work as an academic technologist in the humanities, it really helps me to understand and exploit these distinctions.

Web-based assignments can help reduce the occurrence of academic dishonesty, as well as make for media-rich student projects. Part of the beauty of web-based projects is that they are on public display, so students seem less likely to plagiarize others.